The Aesthetics of Interest and the Irish Question: William Carleton's and Anthony Trollope's Famine Novels

Focusing on famine novels by William Carleton and Anthony Trollope and drawing upon Sianne Ngai's account of aesthetic categories, this article questions how the “interesting,” as an aesthetic category, accommodates cultural difference and distance, on one hand, and demonstrates how material interests shape and delimit the expansion of the public sphere, on the other. It argues that Irish novels present Ireland as aesthetically interesting insofar as it differs from England—suggesting strangeness, peculiarity, unpredictability. Yet including Ireland in a vision of a shared public tends to require the opposite—the assimilation of Irish people into British interests—rendering Ireland conventional and familiar. In other words, the strangeness or novelty that makes Ireland aesthetically interesting is the very thing that prevents Irish people from being incorporated into the liberal idea of a public or a vision of British public interest.